Luke decker hts

Neue Nationalgalerie Luke Decker with Fabrizio Ballabio, Tutor

To Design To design is to plan and organize, in order to relate and to control In short it embraces all means opposing disorder and accident Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.

JOSEPH ALBERS (B)

Figure 1 TO PLAN AND ORGANIZE

Figure 2 TO RELATE

Figure 3 TO CONTROL

TO PLAN AND ORGANIZE, TO RELATE, and TO CONTROL The Neue Nationalgalerie by Mies van der Rohe – the anthem to his lifelong pursuit of perfecting the quote-on-quote Miesian grid in his tenure as the modern architect – is not a piece of architecture at all. Well, perhaps it is a piece of architecture formally – in having roof, a door, and a space to occupy – and maybe in practice too – in serving as the home to some of the most prized pieces of art in Germany’s New National Gallery’s permanent collection. But despite the obvious indicators of its typology, there still exists an uncanniness to it. Mies’ decision to rehash the penultimate design of his career for his final – that design for the never built Bacardi building in Cuba – in his own home setting of Berlin is, without question, strange. Mertins Detlaf rightfully notes, [There are] functional problems in displaying art in the great glass hall under the levitated grid, a space that was colossal in scale, dwarfing most paintings and sculpture, that was almost entirely open, without walls for mounting art, and was enclosed completely of glass, letting light and views stream in unless the curtains were drawn.1 While the Neue Nationalgalerie is unmistakably nothing new in the wheelhouse of Mies’s repertoire – his work almost entirely consisting of gridded, black I-beam idolizing, box-like architectonic structures in three scales – he seems to fail miserably at imparting his unwavering dogma to the task of creating his second major global museum.

For while the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston was just an expansion project – and had the benefit of the doubt of being tucked away behind and beneath masses of trees on a low, flat plain – the Neue Nationalgalerie site was perched high on a plinth front and center in Berlin’s prestigious Kulturforum district. Rephrasing Detlaf’s critique above rather bluntly: the design just didn’t work.

Or did it? From Postdamer Platz, the center of a former thriving West Berlin and now the star-architectural development capital of the world, the Neue Nationalgalerie sits atop at a venerable distance beyond. Looking more like an modern archetypal acropolis watching over the city than a humble art gallery, perhaps the Mies-crowned site is – at least the crown itself – just 1

Mertins Detlef, excerpt from Modernity Unbound (London: AA Publications,

that: the prized piece of art in the New National Gallery’s hold. It is abundantly clear on all fronts and sides that Mies could care less about the programmatic brief presented to him by the museum administration in the upper level. With that said though, contrarily to Detlaf’s observations, the Miesian structure’s functional ineptness is radically brilliant. It made absolute perfect sense not only for his museum design, but also – most notably – for his last built mark.

The impracticality of using the upper level as an art museum was not the epitome of an emblematic modernist failure of applying a universal ideology unilaterally to maintain sameness and control, but rather a calculated decision to keep the most public structure same and under control. For all of the reasons laid out by Detlaf et al. for the building’s failure, this paper argues the exact opposite: the levitated grid, the colossal space, the wall-less interior, and exterior glass-clad state-of-the-art steel frames are not merely a shed for other artists to occupy. They are Mies’ permanent collection on display for all of the building’s eternity: same and under complete control.

The three drawings in this series respond to Neue Nationalgalerie as it stands as a piece of art and not architecture. Like the various gridded panels that Jean Nouvel so carefully laid out for his Cité Judiciaire in Nantes, these interpretive takes of the Miesian monument use the grid as a visual tool of formal analysis per se. Each drawing maintains the same local scale on paper in final iteration as a theoretical construct, though what is being presented ranges in global scale from the column to the wall to the whole space itself.

Although several more grids were generated in the process of design study, the three that stand apart as a whole body of work are those grids that reflect an element of infinitum to them. For while grid lines extend into the infinite horizon in perspective, the flat grid plane must be carefully manipulated to give the same illusion, and for that reason, Mies was a master of grid art. This body of work observes the moment of grid-(un)bound infinitum in the corner-less columns (Figure 3), the mid-grid-line situated walls (Figure 2), and the rather unmarked, permeable (un)boundaries of the space itself (Figure 1).

While several art and architectural historians have compared Mies’ work rather regularly to the artists of the De Stijl legacy, none yet have compared him to the work of Josef Albers. While the partition layouts on a grid might evoke an early Mondrian in cross examination of Mies’ work, it seems to be

more so the formulaic strategies of a late Albers that seem to parallel the design process of Mies. For the iterations of the Homage to the Black Square (1959) study by Albers – in all the hundreds of their iterations in fact2 – share one constant: the distance from the innermost square to the second square to the third square, and so on. As T.G. Rosenthal so thoughtfully observes, Even if one looks at large displays of, say, Malevich or late Mondrian, the paintings are less formulaic, infinitely more varied in design. With Albers one gets only, in several different sizes, ranging from 30x30cm to 120x120cm, a single rigid formula of juxtaposed squares as described by Nicholas Fox Weber above.”3 With Mies’ final work in the Neue Nationalgalerie, it appears he did the same over the course of his career: projection and speculation by means of changing scale, but never proportion. The 1.2m gridded module was Mies’ signature on his artwork in the same way that Alber’s tripling of the inner box to get the second box above it and doubling of the inner box to get second box below it, and so on, was his own.

The first drawing (Figure 1) responds to the moment of permeability of space on the plinth, particularly with the thin nature of the glass splitting inside from outside, but also the roof hang that extends beyond the border of the interior. Using an Albers-like quality to the drawing, and subsequent iterations (Figures 2 and 3), there are three boxes: an innermost, a second, and a third.

In this particular iteration (Figure 1) the border between the innermost and second box is a soft line (but even more so just the change in color from a faint gray to a darker, more concentrated gray), a conceptual nod to the implied permeability observed in the split between the interior of the Miesian entrance hall and the immediate exterior still under the roof hang.

The concentrated color of the interior was created by drawing an unusual plan of overlaying all of the elements of the uppermost New National Gallery building on top of each other like ghosts: from the roof plate, the roof insets, the light holds, the lights themselves, and the gridded floor plate.

The second box of a more faint gray was created with only two layers: the

2

T.G. Rosenthal, Joseph Albers: Formulation: Articulation (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006).

3 Ibid., p. 18.

ghost-like layering of the roof on top of the gridded floor plate. The outermost box is merely just the gridded floor plate of the plinth.

In the second iteration (Figure 2) the innermost box is absent, the second is a softer gridded floor plate, with the four entrance doors marked out with a double line grid, while the third maintains the gridded pattern of the floor plate on the plinth. The importance of this drawing is both at the scale presented in final iteration, but also in a closer resolution (see Appendix).

The idea of infinitum is explored here in the corner-less columns, both in their layout (displayed most clearly in the resolution presented) as well as in their structure (seen in the resolution presented in addendum). Because the corners of the columns never come to a point, both logically in the corners of the roof plate – where they should be situated for the most structural efficiency – as well as in their structural makeup, the implied box quote-onquote contained by their perimeter can never be contained.

The third and final iteration of the series riffs off of the design decision made in Figure 2, that of an unbounded box. This time, the second box disappears into the grid plate of the plinth, while the innermost stands out in full glory. What is interesting though about this drawing is neither of the boxes themselves, but rather the connection between them. Not seen very well at the resolution presented (see Appendix for a closer viewpoint) – but still evident in what looks like a bit of a thicker line on the last line of the plinth grid between it and the interior box – is the boundary slip of the interior walls just outside of it’s containment. The wall actually lies not contained within the grid but on the intermediary line between two grid cells, displaying what Rosalind Kraus would articulate as a centrifugal grid rather than a centripetal one.4 What is interesting about this articulation of the structure, again, is how it points outward in infinitum rather than inward into containment.

As Albers writes in his short mantra referenced at the beginning of this text, to design is to plan and organize, to relate, and to control. That is exactly what Mies is doing with the New National Gallery in Berlin, though the crown as a more infinitely-projected art project than an architecture one – both in time and literally in space, as explored in the formal analysis of the above gridded drawings.

4

Rosalind Krauss. "Grids." October 9 (1979): 51-64.

Bibliography Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971. First edition 1963.

Albers, Josef. Quoted in Eugene Gomringer (ed.), Josef Albers: His Work as Contribution to Visual Articulation in the Twentieth Century. New York: George Wittenborn, 1968.

Albers, Josef. Quoted in Nicholas Fox Weber, introduction, Josef Albers: His Art and his Influence, exh. Cat., Montclair Art Museum. New Jersey, 1981.

Greenberg, Clement. The Nation. February 1949, quoted in Donald Judd, op. cit.

Judd, Donald. Introduction, Josef Albers, exh. Cat., Cologne Distel Verlag. 1991.

Krauss, Rosalind. "Grids." October 9 (1979): 51-64.

Rosenthal, T.G. Joseph Albers: Formulation: Articulation. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006.

Figure 1 Resolution of Roof Grid

Figure 2 Resolution of Cornerless (Un) Bounding Column

Figure 3 Resolution of Centrifugal (Un) Boundary Wall